Message services are increasingly depended upon by users to handle their vital communications, such as email, telephony, and video communications. Many different data protection solutions are employed to protect data in message environments, including data replication solutions. Data replication typically involves creating copies of source data and continuously updating the copies as modifications are made to the source data.
In an example involving email, an active email database is replicated to one or more passive email databases. At any given time the email service can failover from the active email database to any of the passive email databases, thereby ensuring that end users will be able to access their messaging content. As modifications are made to the active email database, the modifications are also replicated to the passive databases. For example, sending, receiving, or moving messages represent modifications that must be replicated.
At times, the rate at which modifications are made to source data, or even just the magnitude of a single modification, can overwhelm the ability of a replication process to adequately replicate the modifications to the corresponding copies of the source data. Other factors, such as the sub-optimal performance of systems or sub-systems involved in the replication, may also reduce the effectiveness of the replication process.
Various tools allow administrative personnel to manually observe the state of a replication process or the progress made in replicating modifications to source data. The personnel can then empirically decide whether or not to launch further modifications to the source data, such as moving files or folders within the source data.